The Blondie guitarist charts his drug-fuelled journey from young punk to pop pioneer with charming nonchalance
– who swiftly transcended their roots in the New York punk scene to become one of the biggest bands in the world, selling around 40m records in the process – Chris Stein had lived quite a life.
In Under a Rock, all of this is related in a drily funny, but wilfully understated style – every sentence feels like a shrug.
Equally, you wonder whether some of the book’s nonchalant tone may be down to the fact that Stein seems to have been more or less permanently stoned from about 1965 to 2008, on weed, acid, coke, heroin, or methadone. His fairly phenomenal drug intake and the “sketchy” situations it led him into – he somehow managed to maintain a smack habit even while being treated in hospital for a rare and potentially life-threatening autoimmune condition – is rendered in the usual style.
You get a distinct sense of the band’s combustibility, fuelled by drugs and personality clashes – at one early London show, Blondie’s five male members exit the stage straight on to the street, brawling all the way – but less in the way of analysis of their music. Perhaps that fits.
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